


Mothers

by HolmesianDeduction



Series: 25 Days of Holiday Fic 2k12 [12]
Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: 25 Days of Fic, Bill Haydon - Freeform, Character Study, Control, Gen, George Smiley - Freeform, Jim Prideaux - Freeform, Memories, Pre-Canon, The Circus - Freeform, The Mothers - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 02:26:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HolmesianDeduction/pseuds/HolmesianDeduction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[25 Days of Holiday Fic: Day 13 - Peppermint]</p>
<p>Peter has always had a particular relationship with the Circus mothers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mothers

             Peter always had a sentimental place in his heart for the oldest of the mothers - the feared, sharp-tongued women who had been there from the start, some of whom were old as Control and then some - and they for him.  For Peter, at least, these women were both their jobs and everything their titles suggested, and while he - in certain company - joked about their fierce protectiveness over their duties and their disdain towards Control’s usurper, he privately caught himself bristling at any derision directed their way.

             While most of his early childhood memories were foggy at best, he was conscious of, after his mother’s reposting at London Station, spending much of his formative years under the watchful eyes of the ladies in grey, who smelled of bitter coffee and newsprint, and who, when they were not too busy - and usually at least one could spare a few moments - entertained him with tales brought in from the field.  It was they, more than his parents, who reared him on the mythology of the Circus - on stories of Jim and Bill stringing along southern Europe, of the cleverness of George Smiley, of Control’s defeat of the Department in the early days of the Circus - stories which he believed in earnest and later discovered to be true, if darker and more streaked through with grey than he remembered them.  And it was the mothers who slipped him small peppermint candies in exchange for his absolute silence on days when Control swept through the corridor like Death himself.

             Years later, Peter was climbing the ladder rapidly, the mothers’ eyes still on him as he made runs up to the fifth floor - usually working for George Smiley, but other times under the request of Bill Haydon - and in the absence of his own mother, who had died years before her son had stepped foot on Sarratt’s soil, it was the mothers who shot crooked smiles and tittered proudly amongst themselves at his successes, and who fretted when he came home from North Africa in his socks.  Even after Jim Prideaux was shot and everything went to hell, Peter managed to slip up to their offices for news, both of the state of the fifth floor and of the networks abroad.  They never protested when, during these visits, Peter’s hand invariably dipped into the mint bowl to rob them blind, and when he was exiled to the dingy Siberias of Brixton, they mourned him as another victim of something rotten lurking in the Circus.


End file.
